This text is in the first person. It is the only place on the site where it is used, and it is signed.
Too often, around me, someone was lost and those left behind stood in front of a locked phone, inaccessible accounts and a great many unanswered questions.
It is not the grief that makes those moments hard — grief, one gets through. It is what comes on top of it: the impossible paperwork, the subscriptions that keep being paid without anyone knowing which, the photographs that will never be recovered, and the nagging sense that the person would have wanted to say something.
SafeTale was first called "the black box", after the ones in aircraft. The image eventually bothered me: a black box records for investigators, after a crash. That is not what SafeTale does.
The name stayed in my vocabulary, which is why it still appears here. But to explain the product, I now prefer to speak of an alarm clock in reverse: as long as you keep pushing it back, it never rings.
Let us be honest: SafeTale also came out of a wish to take on a real problem in computer security. Encrypting client-side, passing access on regardless, and not lying about what that entails — the three together make a thornier problem than it first appears.
That is what explains the "What we don't claim" page. I have not found a solution that both passes on access and never allows reading it. Rather than pretend, I wrote down why.
I have been working on it for years, and I still am. The product is free, without advertising and without any billing mechanism — not out of philanthropy, but because it never had a business plan.
The two pieces of work under way are data export and self-service account deletion. They are the two limits the limits page must currently acknowledge, and the ones I am most impatient to remove.
